Corporate officers’ breach of fiduciary duties such as insider
trading, fraudulent accounting and breach of trust are treated differently
in various jurisdictions. In the USA , in response to the scandals such as
Enron, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act has marked the increased use of criminal
penalties to enforce fiduciary duties, which is a shift away from the
traditional use of civil remedies in corporate law. However, in other
countries, there is a call to resort less to criminal penalties and to
extend the application of civil remedies. There is no universally right
approach; each jurisdiction should take its own situation into
consideration.